Young, Pregnant And Still In School

In High Schools Today, Students Attend Classes On Parenting And Leave Their Kids At Tax-supported Day-care Centers. Are Schools Meeting A Human Need, Or Making It Too Easy For Teens To Have Babies?

July 16, 1995|By MAREGO ATHANS

STEPHANIE KING IS THE GIRL EVERYONE WANTED TO LOOK LIKE IN HIGH SCHOOL. She's five eleven and pick thin, with long brown hair and big blue eyes. She used to model, but now there's no time. She's popular with the boys, but not interested. She just got her driver's license, and she's thrilled. She wears jeans and polo shirts, like a lot of other sophomores at Santaluces High in Lantana.

Oh, and a big round pin with a picture of her baby.

Stephanie, 16, lives only two miles from school. But now she gets up in the dark at 5:30 to breast feed Kelsey. Her teacher, Michelle Matella, came to the hospital two months ago when Kelsey was born. The nurse hadn't taken time to explain breastfeeding, so Matella showed Stephanie how. For a while, Stephanie carried a breast pump to school.

Now, Stephanie and Kelsey start their days together in the powder blue bedroom where mother and daughter sleep, crib next to bed. In the closet hang teenage pants and tops, next to baby pajamas and dresses.

Every morning, after chorus and English, Stephanie heads through the doorway marked "Home Economics" for her third period class. But there are no smells of omelets or cakes in this class. The school has changed the curriculum to Parenting - what to do if the baby has a fever, why it's important to read to your baby....

At lunchtime on this day in late May, Stephanie meets her friends Diana and Debra, both 16. They sit in their usual spot in the cafeteria, next to some rowdy boys. Debra Ware has the front strands of her long dark hair swept up on the top of her head in a cloth hairpiece. Every time she sees Stephanie's baby, she wants one too. She's been trying to conceive for the past month.

"I need something to put my life on track," she says. "I've been skipping school a lot, not caring about life, and I think a baby would make me take life more seriously."

Next to her, Diana Tyler Tsakiris admits she has similar longings.

"I've got these feelings," she says. "I need someone to give them to."

A few tables away, Josie Espinoza returns from the lunch line wearing a baby-doll dress protruding at the stomach. The petite 16-year-old is six months' pregnant. She spreads ketchup on her pizza and rushes it down before the bell rings.

ONCE UPON A TIME, even three to five years ago, a girl got pregnant and disappeared, sometimes to a special school for young outcasts. Often, she just dropped out and went to live with Aunt Catherine.

But today, the sight of a belly in its eighth month is common in school. Students sit in class and swap baby pictures and stories as if they were discussing a new puppy. Even middle schools are seeing a spate of unabashed pregnancies.

"Every time you turn around someone is pregnant," says Stacey Crissinger, a junior at Santaluces. "And often, it's the people you least expect."

There was Laila Idrissi two years ago, the 17-year-old homecoming queen, national honor society scholar and cheerleader who attended school throughout her pregnancy. This year's senior class secretary and student council member, Samantha Barber, 19, a former basketball star, has two children.

A few girls got together recently and threw a baby shower on campus. One girl named her baby after her teacher, Ron Howard.

When sophomore LaPatrick ("Patrick'') English, 18, passed his girlfriend's sonogram picture around World History class, everyone oohed and aahed. When another student brought her sonogram to science class, the teacher put it on the overhead projector and made a lesson out of it.

THE UNITED STATES HAS ONE OF the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the industrialized world, with four of 10 girls becoming pregnant before their 20th birthday. Teen birthrates are actually lower today than they were in the mid-1950s - though they have climbed over the past decade. The difference is that, years ago, teenagers who got pregnant were much more likely to be married, or get married - shotgun style.

The birthrate for unwed teenagers has risen dramatically over the years: 43 percent in Florida from 1985 to 1992, 44 percent nationwide. Last year, 1,111 unwed teens gave birth in Broward, 824 in Palm Beach and 2,287 in Dade.

Young mothers carry both health risks and societal costs. They are more likely to deliver unhealthy babies because teenagers are prone to premature delivery and often receive little prenatal care. They also often forfeit an education. Families begun by teenagers cost taxpayers $34 billion nationwide in 1992, and teenage mothers are more likely to stay on welfare. A recent study projected that births to teenagers in Florida during 1992 alone would cost the state $1.2 billion over the next 15 years.